A personal hotspot acts as a wireless router device enabling multiple devices to connect to the internet via a cellular telephone or other cellular data connection. The bandwidth available for cellular data communications is limited. As a consequence, cellular data service providers are concerned about the network traffic generated when multiple users connect using a single data plan. To improve resource allocation, cellular data service providers benefit from learning the usage patterns of their individual customers. However the providers are only able to collect limited information on their own.
Internet traffic is includes data streams with each stream passing from an originating node, through any number of intermediary nodes, and on to destination node. Each data stream is broken into individual data packets that include a header describing network routing information and a payload containing the data to be delivered. Because, the cellular data service provider serves as an intermediary node, it would be required to open packets originating from or directed to a potentially vast multitude of customers in order to learn more about each individual customer's usage patterns. The goal of the provider is to quickly and efficiently move data, so inspecting packets at an intermediary node is impractical. Moreover, routers and other edge-of-network devices aggregate data from multiple customers and pass packets into the network which cannot be traced back to individual customers. As a consequence, cellular data service providers are uninformed of individual customer usage patterns.